Victory to the Victims!

They say that those who are abused as children often grow up to become abusers. The challenge of critiquing a victim’s account (as I might wish to do with Inna Rozentsvit’s piece) is that one inevitably becomes the victimizer. I guarantee that my remarks here will be dismissed extremely quickly as antisemitic. So, I want to start with a brief event that upset me and upset my daughter (who is in her mid-50s) even more. She, as a teenager, had a romantic boyfriend who wanted her to accompany him back to his kibbutz (a community in Israel, usually rooted in agriculture). As we are not Jewish, she felt torn and eventually decided she wished to begin adult life with the freedom to travel and explore. Her ex-boyfriend returned to his kibbutz, and they have kept in touch ever since. Well, that was until October 7^th when his kibbutz, close to Gaza,

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was flattened, and he was killed with a shot to the head. It brought us, the family, close to the Hamas/Israel Defense Forces (IDF) war.

In connection with that incident, I would like to mention that many years ago, I was quite closely acquainted with Ghada Karmi, a woman who, at the age of six or so, had been expelled with her family from their home in Jerusalem in 1948, and they became refugees in London. The woman had nevertheless done quite well and became a doctor. Recently, I discovered she had written a memoir of her exile, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002), which I read with fascination.

My next relevant incident is that a couple of years ago, the Tel-Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis asked me to become an honorary member, which I felt honored me, and I agreed. A month ago, at the end of October, seeing the pogrom being conducted by the IDF in Gaza, I decided to resign my honorary membership. This, not surprisingly, called forth a hurt response, saying, “It’s a shame that to be seen as morally right among your anti-Zionist colleagues is not to act against the antisemitism in London streets.” I felt condemned, of course.

I was subsequently talking to a good Jewish friend and colleague who has close connections with Israel (I think he has a holiday home there) who said he believed that the Palestinians dying in Gaza were being killed by Hamas. I was astonished by the recent discussions in newspapers about the exchange of hostages. It appears that Israel is willing to exchange Palestinian prisoners who are women and children. Astonishing. Does Israel imprison children? It cannot be … can it?

Inna Rozentsvit’s piece is straightforward “anti-antisemitism.” My own experience, as I have tried to convey, is painfully more complicated. As a psychoanalyst, I have tried to reflect on this extraordinary emotional complexity that makes us all want to take refuge in some easy, one-sided commitment. In the presence of such a powerful nation-to-nation blame game, how can one find ground on which to stand securely and realistically?

There are powerful unconscious emotions at play—threat, terror, and murder. They enslave our reasoning and devote it to high-volume self-justification and murderous responses. My understanding of the response I got from the colleague in the Tel-Aviv Institute who condemned my anti-Zionism as antisemitism demonstrates this. I may be anti-Zionist, but certainly not antisemitic.

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The conflation of the two speaks to how a desperate emotion can interfere with and overwhelm a rational appraisal of reality. My actual reaction, so far as I can grasp it in my own mind, is that I am profoundly against Hamas whilst sympathetic to the majority of Palestinians and opposed to the Jewish punitive expedition in Gaza. However, I’m also sympathetic to Israelis with whom I have a lot in common—as well as enthusiastic about comrades and friends who are assimilated Jews in the UK.

It points me to the psychoanalytic idea of the reality principle in which human beings have a mind that reaches beyond animal reflex actions in reality and can form representations in the mind. These are of inestimable use for genuine inquiry and experimentation, not least for accepting there are various alternative ways of looking at things. Such an important use of the capacity to represent is in contrast to the reflex hard line, but easy, one-sided commitment. It is quite understandable in high-stress situations, as we currently have in Israel/Palestine, that the reality principle can become a bit wobbly.

In British psychoanalysis, it is familiar that under some circumstances, representations in the mind can cease to do their job. They become, in Hanna Segal’s (1957) word, an “equation.” Instead of an idea being represented for inquiry and use, it becomes an installed element of one’s being, so that one is identified with it such that it is a veritable loss of identity to allow any questioning or critiquing. That is the nature of an ideology; it is a part of one’s being, and one is one’s ideological belief system. To lose something of one’s ideology is to lose one’s being, as suicide bombers could attest.

In the blame game situation, it is essential to remain blameless and imperturbably in the right. Rationality is mobilized solely to that purpose rather than to represent reality—and what greater aid to rationalizing one’s innocence is there than to be a victim (at least in one’s own unconscious mind)? The conclusion: Beware the self-justifying victim, on either side; they can be dangerous.

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